Forwarded from: James Pavlik
[Try this: http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/ :) - WK]
I agree with the spirit of Cecil's remarks, but Leet also confounds
most text recognition software. Like pig Latin, if you cannot
translate on the fly, the information becomes noise.
To text scanners, the entire conversation is broken and garbled, I.E.
Noise. This is seen as a benefit for those that may have computer
literate parents or others that actually monitor their kids activities
on the net. like pig Latin was cryptography for the sesame street
crowd, rot13 in the early Arpanet/internet days, today's gen( XYZ? )
have "invented" leet.
Once you learn the rules, it is not a mystery, and I am sure that as
we old duffers speak, somebody is coding a l33t5p33k to English
translation programming routine to assist the over 25 crowd and "big
brother" keep up. but for those folks that have to call the kids to
"FIX" the VCR because it is flashing 12:00 again, its perfect. do you
grok it?
James Pavlik
Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private>
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/030110.html
10-Jan-2003
Dear Cecil:
I have an Armchair University degree in English linguistics, and I was
thinking about the "l33t5p33k" we see on the Net these days, as well
as the Princification of the language, the replacement of "you" with
"u" and "to" with "2," etc. Is this just bad English, or is this the
next step? Will the English language in 100 years look like the
rantings of a 15-year-old hacker as we see it now, and will numbers
become letters (1 = I, 2 = to, 3 = E, 4 = for, 5 = S, etc)?
--Montfort, via the Straight Dope Message Board
Cecil replies: <SNIP>
Now comes 133t5p33k, proof that the flames of intergenerational
antagonism burn as brightly as ever. Used mainly by teenage chat-room
geeks, gamers, and wannabe h4x0r5 (hackers), 133t5p33k replaces
standard letterforms with others looking vaguely similar, e.g., 1 for
L, 3 for E, 5 for S, and so on (see www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leet for a
rundown). Thus 133t5p33k transliterates to "leetspeek." The
uninitiated will now ask: What's a leet? It's short for elite, j00
14m3r (j = Y, 4 = A). No one is sure where the name came from, but the
meaning is clear enough: Only the elite (i.e., your friends, who are
definitely not over 40) are supposed to understand it. Leet involves
multiple layers of coding, the better to trip up the unhip. Thus "you
are" becomes u r, "the" is purposely misspelled t3h (leetists have
adopted common typos as a point of pride), K3W1357 means
kewlest/coolest, w4r3z (wares) is slang for pirated software, and so
on.
[...]
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